Gay says her story, “demands to be told and deserves to be heard”, implicating the reader by creating direct involvement in her story, and encouraging the reader to be active in their response.
The purpose of the memoir is to help people understand our complicated relationship with weight, weight loss, and weight gain, especially as women in a society which places value in appearance and passes unfair judgement on those who do not fit the typical, ascribed body. Gay emphasizes that the memoir is not a story of weight-loss, but a story of the journey of her relationship with her body, including weight gain and loss, eating disorder, shame, guilt, strength, and willpower. Hunger follows Gay’s life through her childhood, describing how sexual assault shaped her eating habits and how this entwined with her identity. Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (my) Body demonstrates an intersectionality of race and gender through lived experience within her life writing.
